What Happens on Platforms

You may not have experienced this yet, but many have learned the hard way that corporate run platforms put profits before people and do what the government tells them. These platforms regularly ban or cancel accounts, discontinue services, raise fees, change the terms of service, censor speech, feed information about you to AI, or start filling the sites with hostile advertising and tracking. Governments also compel these companies to do things not in your interest. You usually have little to no recourse. It is unwise to become too dependent or hostage to these platforms. If your business is based on a platform, you are at greater risk.

Platforms have a life cycle where they start off being very attractive and welcoming to people. After they have captured a critical mass of people to attain network effects, they start extracting value from these people to their real customers who are advertisers, data brokers, and governments. In the final stage, they extract value from their customers. This is called enshitification.

If you are using any platforms such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft etc., ask yourself "What if they closed my account, and I lost all access?" If you would lose important connections or services you need, you are probably hostage. Hostages get abused because they are not free to push back.

Solution

You can mitigate this problem and put yourself more in control of your digital life. You can then more safely use government/corporate platforms when needed. By owning a domain you control, people can always find you where you want them to find you. If you must leave a platform by choice or by force, it is less of an impact because people know where to find you.

This does not solve the problem with platforms. The solution to that is leaving platforms altogether and moving to decentralized instances connected by common protocols like we have here on Ravergram.club. 

Step 1: Register your own domain

Buy your own domain such as yourname.com at a domain registrar. Technically you are renting the rights to use the domain, but as long as you keep paying the generally low yearly fee, you have control of your digital identity.

Many other registrars such as https://www.hover.com/, https://porkbun.com, Gandi.net, and https://www.namecheap.com/ sell these.

Step 2: Create your page or full website

You can point your domain to any site through your domain registrar. This site can have links to all the places where people can find you such as Linkedin, the fediverse and so forth. Here are a few options:

• Create a Linkstack page with all your links on our Linkstack at https://link.ravergram.club or one of these instances: https://linkstack.org/instances/.

• Create a free site at neocities, but you need to understand some HTML.

• Create a full website or blog and go as big as you want:

  • Maybe you are lucky to know someone hosting a server and willing to host your site.

  • You can easily rent a VPS (virtual private server) from a company such as Hetzner, Digital Ocean, or many others.

  • You can also setup a server with a small single board computer at your house using https://yunohost.org.

This page you create is visible to anybody on the internet who searches for it. So make your own choices of what you want to display publicly. Once people contact you through private channels, you can steer them to any preferred anonymous channels.

Step 3: Share your domain with people

Whenever you want to share contacts with someone, simply give them your domain/site name. Because the page contains all the ways you want them to reach you, it is all they need store in their address book. You can change the content of this page and the ways to contact you any time you want without the need for them to update anything. You can easily generate a QR code for your site and save it on your phone for people you meet in person.

Step 4: Email

This is optional but highly recommended. If you own a domain(s), you can have an email address that is independent of whoever is hosting your mailbox. This prevents you from being locked into any mail provider and locked out of accounts such as your bank if your email provider goes down or kicks you off. I also recommend using private email services which means that nobody but you can read your inbox. Advertising supported email services rely on others reading your email to serve you personalized ads.

• Proton, Fastmail, and Tutanota are some of the providers of private email that allow you to use your own domain.

Email Aliasing

Do not give companies your real email address if you can avoid it. You can use an email aliasing solution from your mail provider, Simplelogin, or Anonaddy. You can also buy a domain and create a catch all forward. Njal.la is good for anonymous domains. These all forward to your mailbox but don't reveal your real identity to those companies and data brokers. Ideally give every company a different email alias to protect yourself from spam, breaches, and data brokers.

Gradually replace your @adtechcompany.com email address with either aliases for subscriptions/purchases or your @yourname.com email address for important accounts like banking and your friends and family.

Phone numbers

You can and should use multiple phone numbers. You can create new VOIP numbers from services such as voip.ms, jmp.chat, and mysudo.com. If you are someone with an account on this server, you can use this number.

Notes on Anonymity

Signing up to some platforms anonymously can be difficult. They have advanced tools for identity management and will often reject or cancel accounts they see as suspicious. You may need to look like a normie by creating your account from some public WIFI. Your devices and the overlay networks you use are important to understand. Ask me if you want any help.